No Coffin for the Corpse

Chapter Five: Merlini Loses an Angel

If some archeologist of the year 3000 ever digs up an Early Twentieth Century Manhattan classified telephone directory, and if one of his historian colleagues, carefully investigating its brittle pages, notices a listing that is there under M—Magical Apparatus, Magicians—I suspect that his published comments on the civilization of the Streamlined Age will contain certain belittling remarks.

If, on the other hand, a medieval sorcerer, Raymond Lully perhaps, or Nicholas Flamel, could return from the grave and walk into the shops of any of the nine concerns listed, he would sell his soul a dozen times over for many of the mysteries in stock. Even Cagliostro would be as excited as a small boy in a toy store at Christmas time. And the Spanish Inquisition, after one hasty horrified glance at the catalogues, would promptly consign them, the shops, and their proprietors to the flames.

The most famous of these stores among conjurers is Merlini’s The Magic Shop, located in an otherwise sedate office building just off Broadway. Although it is not the dusty, gloomy little shop of black candles, incense, and stuffed alligators attended by an elderly gnome in a tall pointed hat that its sales slogan, Nothing Is Impossible, might lead you to expect, it does nevertheless have a distinct air of sulphur and brimstone about it. The miracles for sale that are spread out in its neat, shining glass showcases, although intended for entertainment purposes only, are witchcraft just the same — psychological sorcery in modern dress.

The right-hand wall as you enter is covered with curiously lettered playbills describing the performances of Pinetti, Bosco, Anderson, Blitz, Alexander, Frikell, Döbler, Robert-Houdin, and the other early celebrities of conjuring. With them are the more modern, mostly autographed photographs of such men as the Herrmanns, Kellar, Maskelyne, Devant, Houdini, Thurston, Leipzig, Cardini, Tenokai.

On the opposite wall, shelves mount ceilingward bearing a bewildering assortment of conjuring paraphernalia, an odd and infinitely varied collection of commonplace objects which, in a magician’s hands, attain the peculiar property of violating all the more immutable laws of physics. There are bird cages that vanish at the count of three, rose bushes that blossom on command, inexhaustible bottles that pour forth any drink called for. There are bright-colored silk handkerchiefs, giant playing cards, billiard balls, red-and-gold Chinese boxes, eggs, alarm clocks, crystal-gazing globes, slates, swords, fish bowls, red-haired ventriloquial dummies, and, of course, a rabbit.

Peter, purely a floor sample and not for sale, is no ordinary bunny. He is a veteran trouper, an honorary member of the Lambs’ and Players’ Clubs, so much the actor that I suspect he too hopes some day to tread the boards as Hamlet. In his time he has made many a sudden and dramatic entrance before the footlights, usually from a top hat. But now, somewhat heavier about the middle and not so easily concealed, he has been retired to a Mohammedan paradise of ease and lettuce nibbling. As I entered, he peered at me from behind a talking skull marked: This Week Only—$7.50, and his pink excited nose wigwagged a friendly greeting.

Burt Fawkes, ex-contortionist, once billed on sideshow banners as Twisto, the Man Who Turns Himself Inside Out, and now Merlini’s shop assistant, leaned across the counter. He was talking to John Scarne, Luis Zingone, and Paul Rosini, a trio of exceedingly nimble-fingered gentlemen who earn their living making decks of cards sit up, roll over, and jump through impossible hoops.

“He was a little guy with an underslung chin and big spectacles,” Burt was saying. “He didn’t say much until he saw Merlini demonstrate our new rapping hand. Then his eyes pop, and before long I’m wrapping up the hand, a spirit bell, a floating light bulb, a medium-size wonder cabinet, the blueprints for walking through a brick wall, and a copy of Miracle Mind-Reading Secrets. He hurries off like he’s got a paying date that night and wants to work all those stunts into his routine before curtain time.

“But the next morning, when I open up, he’s waiting outside the door, and muttering. He eyes me the same way he would if I’d sold him a shipment of gold bricks. He has all the apparatus with him and he dumps it out on the counter nearly breaking the glass. ‘I want my money back,’ he demands flatly. ‘Every cent of it!’

“I didn’t get it. Our improved rapping hand is the best on the market, the spirit bell has a money-back guarantee, and the wonder cabinet holds a bigger load than some I’ve seen twice its size. I tell him so. But he’s stubborn and keeps insisting that none of the stuff is any good at all. He is very insistent about getting his money back. If not, he threatens to complain to the Better Business Bureau.

“‘About what?’ I ask him. ‘This merchandise does everything we claim. You saw it demonstrated yourself. The light bulb burns without visible connection and floats in midair. The brick-wall trick is the original Houdini method.’

“Then it comes out. ‘It’s all a swindle!’ he says disgustedly. ‘They’re just tricks!’

“That floored me for a minute. I edged over nearer those brass lota bowls so I could heave one at his head in case he got violent. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you want the real thing? A rapping hand with a direct spirit connection to hell, a floating light held up by mental concentration, and a recipe for walking through just any brick wall that you happen to meet. That it?’

“He nods, leans across the counter, and whispers confidentially, ‘Yes. No tricks. The real thing! It’s quite all right if you sell them to me. I’m a Third Degree Adept of the Atlantean Order of Rosicrucians. Here’s my Master’s diploma.’ And he gives me a quick look at a very fancy sample of printing and engraving from a Los Angeles correspondence school in the Higher Mysticism. It was signed, spirit writing I suppose, by Saint-Germain and a couple of Tibetan lamas.”

Burt’s audience was grinning. “Did you give him his money back?” Zingone asked.

“I did. Quick too. He’d have probably put the evil eye on me and then gone to the Better Business Bureau, the Mayor’s office, and the FBI.”

“You missed a bet mere, Burt,” I cut in. “You should have sold him a strait-jacket escape. He may be needing it.”

Burt looked around. “Oh, hello, Ross. He wouldn’t have liked that either unless the directions told him how to dematerialize into ectoplasm, ooze through the eyelets, and reassemble himself on the outside. Where have you been? The boss was trying to get you yesterday.”

“Out of town.” I glanced toward the door behind the counter that led to the sanctum sanctorum, if that term is applicable to a workshop where such diabolic contrivances as those Merlini designs are put together. “Is he in?”

“No.” Burt left his audience and moved down the counter toward me. The magicians resumed their discussion of the merits of the Erdnase one-hand shift, which is not the article of wearing apparel you might imagine, but a gambler’s sleight with cards. “He’s over at the Drury Lane. He wants you to stop in. Some script changes, I think, in those sketches you wrote for the show.”

“Rehearsals under way?”

“They were this morning.” Burt frowned. “But I don’t know how long they’ll last. Merlini is shy an angel.”

“Oh, oh. That sounds serious.”

“It is, and somebody has got to be cast for the part quick before we lose our shirts.”

I started for the door. “Don’t look at me,” I said. “At the moment, I couldn’t finance a one-ring flea circus. See you later.”

I headed for the Drury Lane. The Great Merlini, it appeared, in spite of being a magician, was up to his neck in trouble too.

His farewell tour in ’29 was proving to be about as final as any actor’s. This was to be expected in a man who was born on a circus train en route and into a family whose name had been famous in sawdust annals for five generations. Twenty-six years of entertaining audiences under canvas and in what seemed to me, when I once heard him list some of them, nearly every theater on the habitable globe, was a record that makes retirement difficult. Merlini, I had always known, would never be able to resist the call of grease paint and footlights as long as his lean and agile fingers were still nimble enough to make a half dollar vanish into thin air.

He was, at the moment, head over heels in a project he had long dreamed of, one more ambitious than any he had yet attempted — a full-dress magical-musical revue complete with chorus, singers, dancers, a cast that included half a dozen top-flight magicians, and a libretto shot through with streamlined mystification. Big-illusion magic, since the deaths of vaudeville and of Howard Thurston, is rarely seen on today’s stages. The best current conjuring is the more intimate close-up sleight of hand that a group of polished performers present in night-club floor shows and around hotel supper-club tables. It was Merlini’s idea that the larger magical feats were still good box office, provided they were presented in a novel up-to-the-minute manner and in a sophisticated setting of girls and music. He was playing this hunch with his currently projected Hocus-Pocus Revue.

I entered the Drury Lane on 45th Street by the stage door, climbed a short flight of iron steps and found myself suddenly swept on-stage by a rush of girls in ballet slippers and practice costumes. Piano music issued from the orchestra pit, and, from somewhere in the outer dark of the auditorium, Merlini’s voice rose. “Ross, this is an underwater ballet sequence. And we aren’t casting any flounders. Swim down out of it.”

I put an arm around each of the two nearest dancers. “I’m an octopus,” I said. “I’ll need six more of these, one for each arm.”

The piano music stopped. “We’ve got a comedian,” Merlini answered. “A good one.” He spoke to a man in shirt sleeves who sat on the piano top. “Let the girls go, Larry. They’ve been at it long enough. Besides, Don’s all set and he’ll have to be getting back for the next Music Hall show shortly. Bring in the tank and let’s run through that. And I want the lights — spots, foots, and the underwater circuit. Ross, you sit down here and try to act like a tired businessman. I want your reaction.”

I crossed the footlights, descended the rundown, and took a seat in the third row beside the magician whose tall, spare, and sometimes dignified frame extended for an alarming distance out into the aisle. Although he is one of those fortunate persons who can get along comfortably on much less sleep than the average mortal, I got the impression, for once, that he was tired. Why I thought that I don’t know. His black eyes still sparkled with their customary alertness, and the good-humored crinkles at the corners of his mouth bracketed his characteristic impish smile. His magician’s air of self-confidence was there too; his precisely modulated voice still captured and then smoothly misdirected the attention with all its old, expert, hypnotic power.

The delicately co-ordinated movements of his body and highly trained hands, the forcefully cut, though asymmetric, planes of his face, and his attentive interest in practically everything made him appear, as always, at least fifteen years younger than the sixty his Who’s Who biography admits.

His off-stage informality of dress, his lack of the traditional mustache and flowing hair are deceptively unmagicianlike. But, the moment he begins to work at being a conjurer, the practiced ease with which he seems to accomplish the utterly impossible imparts such an air of genuineness to his trickery that a century or two earlier he would have been taken out posthaste and burned at the stake.

“Where,” I asked as I sat down, “did you acquire an underwater ballet, of all things? It’ll give the customers an eyeful of the Grade A, fancy assorted, female anatomy you seem to have hired, but I don’t see how it fits in.”

“You will,” he grinned. “It’s a build-up for the newest Merlini Mystery. Accept no substitutes and keep your eyes peeled. If you can explain it, we’ll toss it out.”

“Always the guinea pig,” I said. “Okay, baffle me.”

As I spoke, the long, white, conical beams of twin spots streamed out above our heads from the balcony and centered in mid-stage on the great, square, glass-walled tank that half a dozen stagehands were pushing out into place. Water swirled and foamed within it, gushing from the nozzles of fire hoses that curled up over the tank’s edge and led away, twisting snakelike across the stage floor to the wings.

Then a raised platform slightly higher than the tank and extending partly over it was shoved into position. A young athletic man with a dark handsome face rose from the seat behind Merlini.

“Well, here goes,” he said, and moved forward toward the stage. He slipped off the dressing-gown he wore, dropped it across a first-row aisle seat, and then, clothed only in the briefest of scarlet swimming trunks, vaulted lightly over the footlight trough up onto the stage. His bronzed body was something that any matinee idol could have been proud of, and he used it with all the sure, graceful ease of a skilled athlete — which, among other things, was what he was.

“A little something,” I said, “for the tired businesswoman to look at too, I see.”

The performer on stage ran lightly up a flight of steps to the raised platform, turned, and bowed in our direction. He stood beside the dark sinister shape of an upended open coffin. Two stage assistants followed him, carrying a formidable collection of heavy handcuffs and leg irons. They quickly adjusted the handcuffs on his extended wrists, pulled the ratchets tight, and locked them. Then they affixed the massive shackles on his legs.

“The cuffs,” Merlini commented, “have been loaned by the police department. Gavigan owed me a favor or two, and I collected. I want you to play that up in one of the publicity releases.”

“Who, me?”

“Yes. You’ve just been appointed press agent.”

I remembered what Burt had said about a missing angel and started to make a delicate inquiry as to salary, but Merlini’s mind-reading ability was working with its usual efficiency.

“We’ll have a business conference later,” he said. “Watch this.”

The two assistants were lifting the performer’s body and placing it within the waiting coffin. The piano player increased his tempo.

The man in the coffin looked out at us, smiled, and raised his manacled arms in a gesture toward the large clock dial that hung from the flies above the tank and on which a single hand began to move, marking off the seconds.

The assistants pulled the hinged coffin lid around into place and swiftly fitted the six chromium hasps that bordered its edge down upon their staples. Heavy padlocks were snapped into place. Then one man tossed the keys that fitted cuffs, shackles, and padlocks down onto the stage floor, and turned to help his partner attach steel lifting cables into fittings at the coffin’s ends.

The men straightened. One waved an arm. A whistle blew, and the cables tightened. The coffin tilted unsteadily, then lifted, swinging out into space.

The whistle shrilled again. The rush of water that poured from the hoses died away and the six-foot depth of water within the tank shone in the spotlight greenly phosphorescent. The dark shape of the coffin hung above it, one assistant leaning precariously forward to steady it with his hands. The piano music was muted, almost inaudible.

Then, the whistle sounded again, loud in the hush. The cables dropped swiftly. The coffin struck the surface with a splash that sent a myriad flashing fountains of bright color cascading upward in the light.

Slack appeared again in the cables as the coffin floated for a moment. Then slowly, as the water seeped in, it sank down through the sparkling green depths. The outline of its hard ugly shape was blurred by the swirling water. It came to rest, finally, on the floor of the tank.

For a space, nothing moved except the hand on the clock dial which reached and passed the first minute mark, and crept closer toward that final red-lettered word: Danger.

As the hand neared the two-minute mark, one assistant hurried from the platform down to the stage and picked up a red-handled fire ax. He hefted it slowly, his eyes on the clock. The other man above gazed anxiously into the water.

“Nice touch,” I commented. “And good acting.”

“It’s not acting,” Merlini said, his eyes fastened on the stage, his voice taut. “This is the first time we’ve tried it!”

My association with Merlini and the magicians who made his shop their headquarters had dulled my wonder at the average miracle and I had, thus far, been watching calmly, sprawled out in my seat. But those words brought me upright, out on the chair’s edge.

The moving hand went on. Two minutes, two and a half. It neared the three-minute mark and the red Danger sign. Then with only twenty short seconds of safety remaining, the assistant down below moved in closer to the tank. He swung his ax up, holding it ready in both hands. The space between the moving pointer and the Danger mark diminished rapidly. A quick, accelerating tom-tom beat swelled in the music.

But still there was no movement from the submerged coffin, no hint of what might be happening in its black, water-filled interior.

Just as the last five seconds began to tick away, the man on the platform suddenly raised one arm. The whistle shrilled again. The man below lifted his ax higher, its bright edge flashing where the spotlight shimmered on the sharp steel.

And then, abruptly, a masking curtain of air bubbles ascended through the water, billowing upward from the tank’s floor around the coffin like escaping steam. The pianist reached the crescendo he had been building toward. The white glare of the spotlights changed to amber, and the green water glinted gold.

The second hand reached and passed the danger mark.

The thin piercing note of the whistle shrilled once more. And slowly, the rising geyser gush of bubbles faded and cleared. The coffin could be seen again, still submerged, still closed, and still locked.

But just above it there was a flash of red swimming suit and of a brown body rising.

Don Diavolo’s head broke the surface. Applause broke the tension in the dark around us where the ballet girls had gathered to watch.

The magician, free of cuffs, shackles, and coffin, pulled himself slowly up from the water’s surface onto the tank’s brassbound edge. He lifted one leg over and balanced there, shaking the dark wet hair back from his eyes. He breathed heavily, filling his aching lungs with air.

“And then,” Merlini said, “curtain. Like it?”

I nodded. “Yes. In fact, I think it’s good. But I know how it’s done.”

That nearly put him down for the count. His eyes popped.

“You what!” he exclaimed, staring at me as though were something with two heads that had just escaped from a bottle.

“I know how it’s done. It’s a trick.”

He grinned with relief and whispered confidentially, “Don’t tell anyone, but that’s it exactly. You’re an analytical genius. I don’t know how you do it.”

“It runs in the family,” I said. “Medical science is baffled. There’s no cure. And how are you?”

“I’m baffled too.” He leaned back in his seat and frowned up at the stage where Larry was saying, “Alright. That’s all. Everybody report at nine in the morning.”

For the first time since I had known him, Merlini’s voice, usually so charged with energy, seemed tired. “I had forgot,” he added, “how many things can go wrong with a Broadway show between script and opening night.”.

“Burt,” I said, “mentioned a little something about angel trouble.”

Merlini nodded glumly at the shiny half dollar that he balanced on his finger tips. “A lot of things in this show vanish into thin air.” The half dollar flickered and did just that as he spoke. “But I hadn’t counted on it happening to the man who writes the checks. It certainly wasn’t in the script. He tried to put over some complicated financial sleight of hand down in Wall Street, and it backfired. The reverberations, of course, echoed dismally all up and down Broadway. And the creditors are howling like so many wolves.”

I decided not to bother the man with my troubles. He had enough of his own. “And so,” I said, “you need a press agent who doesn’t have to eat until after opening night.”

“It’s not quite as bad as that. The Mrs. Merlini Home-Cooked Meals Corporation will be happy to extend you an Annie Oakley, good until opening night. I think she’ll stay in business that long.”

“You think — say, have you put your own money into this show?”

The vanished half dollar reappeared in his fingers as a quarter, then shrank at once to a dime. “I couldn’t help myself,” he admitted. “I had to throw something to the biggest and hungriest wolves.”

I took the dime from his hand quickly before it could decrease in value further. “Okay. I’m hired. I’ll take this as a retainer. I didn’t expect to sleep much for the next few days anyway. And it may keep my mind off other things.”

He gave me a sharp look. “I thought you seemed a bit subdued. Not as much bounce as usual. What’s wrong now?”

“Same trouble you’ve got. Same trouble Red Ridinghood’s maternal grandparent had. Wolves. Tell you about it later. Right now I think I’d better get busy and see if I can think of some way to entice a nice fat angel into our parlor.”

“If you can catch one,” he said gloomily, “I’ll get you an honorary membership in the Society of American Magicians, with loving cup to match. The Broadway angel crop, this late in the season, has been pretty thoroughly picked over.”

Behind us a familiar voice suddenly said, “I think perhaps I can supply one.”

I nearly did a vanishing act of my own that wasn’t in the script, a descent without benefit of trap doors straight down through the floor. I still don’t know what prevented it.

The voice was Kathryn Wolff’s.